Ex-Financial Times Journalist Tom Foremski @ the Collision of Technology and Media

The Future For Middle Class Jobs? China Employs 2 Million To Browse The Web

According to Chinese state media, the country hires two million people to run and monitor its "Great Firewall."Beijing News has reported that many employees are performing keyword searches and checking tens of millions of messages being posted each day....

The "web police" are hired by the government's propaganda arm, as well as by commercial sites.

Foremski's Take: Security is a growing market and there's lots of jobs to be done that still can't be done well by software. It's not the best paid job in the world but it's a steady job with wonderful growth prospects.

There are estimates that one-third of East Germany's population worked for the Stasi security organization either as informers or agents.

In my dystopian fantasies it's easy to see a future in which most people work in security, scanning and patting each other down, at every doorway.

People are essential for security. With the deluge of information an operation such as the NSA's produces, the number of false-positives turned up by its software searches must be astronomical and requires humans to process it forward.

And as the world of subterfuge becomes more sophisticated, it will require ever more feet-on-the-streets, or eyes-on-the-Tweets to combat.

Spying on each other will be crowd-sourced, as it always has been, and that'll generate even more information that someone has to process. Who can you trust? You won't be able to trust anyone with any remark, no matter how glib, or funny.

In a future where trust is rare, patting each other down during a security check might become the closest we get to human contact.

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The Future For Middle Class Jobs? China Employs 2 Million To Browse The Web